Friday, January 5, 2001

McQ's Best Of 2014 Mix Collection

Here we go again, my annual mix collection celebrating the best I heard in rock, pop, hip-hop, soul, electronica, folk, and indie over the prior year.

2014 was, as these songs will attest, a fine music year - not particularly deep, but exceptionally strong at the top!

As always, each mix is designed to be burnable to a standard 70 mb CD. Click on the mix titles for additional information about the artists and albums profiled, printable track listings and year end summaries, links to Amazon, iTunes, and Youtube, and all other sorts of good stuff.

As with the previous three years, we start things off with
choice cuts from most of my favorite 2014 albums (minus a few Nancy gobbled up for her
mix). With Palace, A Little God In My
Hands, Jim Wise, Blank Project, Today More Than Any Other Day, I Prefer Your Love, and 3Jane, this year’s Best Of The Best is edgier than the previous three, but rest assured, it does ease up on into an
accessible back half, and also boasts several tracks (Weight Of Love, Feel, An Ocean In Between The Waves) with remarkable
closing jams – a trait which felt like 2014’s trademark, so many songs this
year with fantastic instrumental endings.

Inspired by the War On Drugs, who open and close this volume,
I set out to make my own great, late-night driving mix. A genre-hopping collection
of long, flowing numbers, this is for the most part a relaxing mix with a slight classic rock slant, punctuated with
just enough up-tempo numbers to keep things from getting too sleepy.

A look at some of the
smaller-font bands that made the 2014 Coachella festival memorable. This is the
one mix where I don’t hold myself to a calendar year/year prior
restriction. If a band I’ll likely never
profile again produced their best song five years back, that’s what goes on
this mix, though I do strive to include most recent material whenever possible.

2014 was a fantastic year for
Post- Rock, and for my money, this mix is both the weirdest and the best of
this year’s collection. Eighty minutes of thrilling, alternatingly soothing or
punishing, ever evolving orchestral-rock crescendos. Swans’ thirty-four minute exploration of the
Haitian revolution Bring The
Sun/Toussaint Louverture, will be a challenge for many, but try to stick
with this mix all the way through - no matter how rough it gets, there’s always
another moment of calm or cool around the corner.

Originally, all these songs
were considered for Volume 3 - Just Let
It Flow – but the amount of material I wanted to include grew too large to
contain on one disc, and thus, the material was split, with the more
emotionally naked, singer-songwriter/folkish material aggregated here.

Modern Indie’s heyday is at
least a half-decade past, well symbolized by the fact that only two songs on
this twenty-song mix come to us via artists I haven’t featured years prior. But
as all these acts prove, passé doesn’t always mean past your prime - some of 2014’s
best songs are on this mix.

A closing collection of
tracks I either ran out of room for or that didn’t make sense on the previous
mixes, Odds & Ends is broken into
four self-explanatory suites – Electro-Soul
Overkill, Brotastic Brouhaha, A Token Shout Out To Hip Hop & Soul,
and A Repulsive Room Clearer To Close It
All Out.